Background

Entire villages were wiped out, and in some regions the death rate reached one-third. The Ukrainian countryside, home of the "black earth", some of the most fertile land in the world, was reduced to a silent wasteland.

Cities and roads were littered with the corpses of those who left their villages in search of food, but perished along the way. There were widespread reports of cannibalism.

Ms Karpenko says that when school resumed the following autumn, two thirds of the seats were empty.

But the pain of the Holodomor comes not only from the unfathomable number of dead. Many people believe the causes were man-made and intentional. A genocide.

They say that Joseph Stalin wanted to starve into submission the rebellious Ukrainian peasantry and force them into collective farms.

The Kremlin requisitioned more grain than farmers could provide. When they resisted, brigades of Communist Party activists swept through the villages and took everything that was edible.

"The brigades took all the wheat, barley – everything – so we had nothing left," says Ms Karpenko. "Even beans that people had set aside just in case.

"The brigades crawled everywhere and took everything. People had nothing left to do but die."

As the hunger mounted, Soviet authorities took extra measures, such as closing off Ukraine’s borders, so that peasants could not travel abroad and obtain food. This amounted to a death sentence, experts say.

"The government did everything it could to prevent peasants from entering other regions and looking for bread," says Oleksandra Monetova, from Kiev’s Holodomor Memorial Museum.

"The officials’ intentions were clear. To me it’s a genocide. I have no doubt."

But for others, the question is still open. Russia in particular objects to the genocide label, calling it a "nationalistic interpretation" of the famine.

Kremlin officials insist that, while the Holodomor was a tragedy, it was not intentional, and other regions in the Soviet Union suffered at that time.

Kiev and Moscow have clashed over the issue in the past. But Ukraine’s present leader Viktor Yanukovych echoes the Kremlin line, saying it was "incorrect and unjust" to consider the Holodomor "the genocide of a certain people".

Mr Yanukovych’s government still takes care to commemorate fully the destruction that the famine wrought.

In the news

Each time, they risked being shot by soldiers enforcing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s decree to confiscate Ukraine’s grain harvest to crush both the resistance to collectivized farms and the national spirit.

Many times, Russian soldiers would charge into a farmer’s house and take everything, breaking up the families, sending people to Siberia

“Father was taken to Siberia in Russia. I never heard from him again, no letters nothing.” …

According to Sagan, she and her sister lived near collective farms that were owned by the Soviet Union during the famine. They were forced to work on the farms but were not allowed to take any produce.

“The fields belonged to the communist,” said Sagan.

“If the communist caught me, I’d be punished. If you were caught, many times they would just shoot you on the spot.”

Farms across eastern Ukraine had their farm animals taken away from them. Communist brigades came around harvested vegetables, destroyed the soil and took everything they could.

Still disputing the numbers

One thing that many news outlets still like to report on is the ‘controversy’ around the number of people who died, as if it really matters:

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress says seven million to 10 million died, though the numbers are still being researched.

The latest study from Ukraine demographers puts the total of 3.9 million deaths from direct starvation, Himka said.

But Jars Balan, also a professor at the U of A’s Ukrainian Canadian studies, said that the 3.9 million total does not include tens of thousands of Ukrainians deported to Siberia, many peasants executed on their doorsteps and deaths just outside Ukraine among Cossacks in those years.

Stalin suppressed the 1937 census data that showed the huge population losses in Ukraine then shot the census takers, Balan added. For years after that, it was difficult to get accurate data to determine how many died until the fall of the former Soviet Union in 1991, Himka said.

Her book traces the story of Orwell’s correspondence with a Ukrainian refugee, and the eventual translation of Animal Farm, 2,000 copies of which were delivered to camps to empower the Ukrainian people.

Her uncle had one of those copies. It now sits on her dresser as a reminder of what they went through, especially 80 years later, as living witnesses are so few.

"There’s a risk it may be forgotten," Chalupa said.

"But I’ve also experienced the power of the shock value — hopefully this (works such as her book) will help produce a snowball effect as more and more researchers and storytellers feel shocked, then compelled to expose the truth."

The other book out now is a novel that takes place during the Holodomor:

In the midst of famine during a forgotten Stalinist genocide, DANYA KOMYSA is a proud Cossack Partisan, forced to witness the murder of his wife during the Soviet Purges and Famine of 1932. Despite his heroic defiance against BOHDAN VRATEK Stalin’s most notorious Chekist General, his lone crusade for retribution seems hopeless. Now as Danya wrestles with his destiny he encounters a powerful resistance group and takes on a deadly challenge. He must chaperone NATALKA ZAKHAROV, once Stalin’s favourite adjutant, yet now Russia’s most wanted fugitive, to Kharkiv City as she flees from the same Chekist General who murdered his wife. As the notorious GENERAL VRATEK and his Cheka Secret Police pursue the pair across the nation, Danya and his Chekist adversary are drawn ever closer together. Relentless conflict, incarceration and rescue soon follow as the chase builds to a dramatic climax in Kharkiv City. Love strikes deep into two open hearts as Danya and Natalka are bound by tribulation and the high emotion of unrelenting pursuit. Finally, Danya settles an astonishing score from the past, delivering a fatal blow deep into the heart of Stalin’s machinery of terror. Now Danya has fulfilled his destiny, as the tide of destruction that has brought his country to its knees draws to a premature close.

Set against a backdrop of real historical events and richly laced with spiritual intrigue, THE WAY OF VENGEANCE is an unforgettable journey of passion, courage and survival.

Few movies have been made about the Holodomor, but in 2009 L.A. producers Bobby Leigh and Marta Tomkiw took up the task of bringing attention to the genocide just after its 75th anniversary with ‘Holodomor: The Movie’.

The movie starts rather quickly making its case for genocide with excerpts from Raphael Lemkin who coined the term as well as the United Nations definition. Throughout the film, it makes references back to these excerpts to show how people’s experiences are within the definitions of genocide.

Where the movie really shines are in its interviews with academia, experts and Holodomor survivors who share their tragic stories of surviving famine and losing their loved ones.

Many of the interviews take place in Ukraine, interviewing different Holodomor survivors who bare their souls to the camera. They speak of the horrors of starving in winter, where Soviet officials confiscate any and all food they can find. As they suffer, their family and friends are either deported to the frozen tundra of Siberia, executed, or die of hunger. Some speak of stories of watching their loved ones perish right in front of them, or arrested and sent away, never to return.

Experts are also interviewed from various research institutions, who not only share tragic stories from their records, but also can speak more of the Stalinist policies and documents that not only targeted ethnically Ukrainian independent farmers to confiscate their farmland, but replace entire Ukrainian villages with ethnic Russians who were more willing to participate in the new communal farms. The institutions also share statistics and demonstrate the calculated, deliberate actions of the USSR against the Ukrainian people. Academia are also interviewed, which provide very good background for time period.

Academia are also interviewed, most notably Rutgers’ Taras Hunczak, who speaks throughout the movie, providing much needed history and important context to a complex period. Hunczak provides a good synopsis to the events, which would otherwise be hard to understand when deciphering many of the memos, and plans from the Soviet era.

With few Holodomor movies in existence, this movie makes a great addition to help complete a small library on the topic. It’s interviews are a great resource for those who want to understand the events better or watch first-hand accounts from survivors.

A Welsh journalist who once flew with Adolf Hitler, helped expose genocide in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and died in mysterious circumstances, is the subject of a new TV documentary.

Gareth Jones, who was also a personal aide to former prime minister David Lloyd George, helped expose Stalin’s "holodomor" policy of deliberate starvation.

This claimed the lives of anywhere between 4m and 10m peasant farmers in the Ukraine during 1932/33.

Jones also formed relations with the Nazis in Germany and even flew aboard Hitler’s private plane.

But in 1935 he was murdered in murky circumstances while reporting from Japanese-occupied Mongolia.

Now Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, on BBC Four’s Storyville strand on Thursday, is examining the 77-year-old mystery of his death.

…

Backed by Lloyd George’s credibility, he was able to travel throughout the USSR and met Russian politicians, while his language skills allowed him to speak to peasant farmers.

However, his warm Soviet welcome would cool abruptly in March 1933, when Jones called a press conference in Berlin to reveal the findings of his two months undercover in starving Ukraine.

The mainstream media poured scorn on Jones’ account, and for a time he was reduced to obscurity. By mid-1933 he had returned home to Barry to live with his parents and he worked as a junior reporter on the Western Mail.

But months later he learned about a new international scandal, in the shape of the Japanese occupation of Inner Mongolia, and he set off there as soon as he could to raise the funds.

‘Agent’

The trip would prove his downfall, as he and his companion, a German journalist named Muller, were captured by bandits in remote countryside, after being turned away by Japanese forces.

Mr Carey said Jones’s death had always been surrounded by controversy, as it was unclear whether the bandits were tipped off by the Japanese, or by the Russian secret police, the NKVD.

"Until now all that was known for certain was that Muller was released on a highly spurious pretext about having been freed on parole in order to raise the ransom, and two days later Gareth was shot for no conceivable reason," he said.

"Probably we’ll never know for certain what happened. However our investigations have shown that the Chinese contact who loaned Jones and Muller a car to travel to Mongolia was definitely an NKVD agent, and there’s strong evidence to suggest that Muller might also have been."

Gareth Jones died a largely discredited figure, on the eve of his 30th birthday, the truth about Stalin’s holodomor only coming to light years later.

However, today he is revered as a national hero in the Ukraine, and is honoured at both Cambridge and Aberystwyth universities.

Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones is on BBC Four’s Storyville strand on Thursday at 21:00 BST.

North American viewers are unfortunately out of luck as the BBC America channel does not air the Storyville documentaries. Only if you get BBC over free-to-air satellite or have a proxy to the iPlayer.